My wife has knitted me several pairs of socks over the years. I am pretty certain that she has given me at least a couple at Xmas. I still have them all and wear them at weekends.
However, other than that, I don’t think that I have given or received anything that is not consumable - food, drink, toiletries, candles, outings etc - for a very long time.
Dark Mustard
Bite my shiny metal ass!
It’s a variation on a local folkloric figure, and the image is modified from the album of a poem about the figure by Martin Newell and the Hosepipe Band.
An excellent sausage and cheese toasted sandwich.
2 x 240L wheelie bins - one for dry mixed recycling, the other for residual waste. They are collected on alternating weeks.
We could pay for a third for green waste, but we compost instead (and have a bokashi bin to assist with that).
There are a few communal glass bins around which we will drop stuff off to as we pass from time to time, since that is not included in the DMR selection.
Soft plastics - bags, film etc - are also not included, but can be recycled at supermarkets - or collected by them when they make a home delivery (which is what we do).
Tetrapaks, WEEE, batteries etc need to be taken to the local recycling centre. We’ll book a slot about once a quarter for that.
As a kid, in the UK, back in the '70s, I was watching Roots and was wondering why they were so keen to get to Scotland. I eventually realised that this was set in the US, of course, and the north there was different.
So I suppose that was my default then but, these days, I typically find myself trying to work out exactly when and where a thing is set, if it isn’t obvious, automatically - before I actually settle into the plot or anything.
I have a selection of natural scenes - some that I have taken myself, other found on the web - that rotate each two hours around the day. Night shots at night etc.
Nope. I still have From LA to New York etched into my brain in bile and loathing from it playing on a cheap crappy clock-radio alarm I had when it was first released in '76 or whenever. Actually waking up to that song probably only happened a couple of times, but it was enough. I found that I preferred the brain-piercing built in alarm to having any other songs or drivelling DJs hypnogogically imprinting themselves.
These days I have either birdsong or Tibetan chimes instead.
I would primarily describe my view as Virtue ethics, but…
On the larger scale, I seek to promote the development of individual virtues and equality within society but, acknowledging that this is always likely to be an aspiration rather than a achieved state then, again, I would look to a deontological approach as a fallback.
I am deeply suspicious of utilitarian arguments in most circumstances, simply through experience of those who tend to promote them. Both egoism and libertarianism seem short-sighted to me.
First name - ultimately biblical in origin and very common at the time of my birth: I went through my entire educational career as one of five with this name (specific people changed, but there were almost always 5 of us).
Middle name: ultimately Germanic in origin. My dad’s middle name too. It has royal connections. I basically never use it.
Last name: the name of a village 30 miles from where I was born. If you look in the village churchyards in a line between the two places, the gravestones show that they moved along about one village per generation. My branch of the family are not great travellers. But, hey, I moved to the next county, so…
Bombastic? Pretentious? Braggart?
In the grand scheme of things I don’t do ‘angry’ that much at all, but the two times when I am most likely to angry at all are commuting to work and then back again. Commuting to, because I will be fuming over the latest environment-destroying, genocidal nazi shit that has hit the news overnight and on the way back because I will be grumbling over whatever nonsense and stupidity has arrived on my desk during that day.
In both cases, I make a positive attempt to get it out of my system by the time I arrive at the end of the travel. I recall a study that concluded that a 16mins commute was optimal for that - which mine was exactly at the time.
I’m the older end of Gen X, and have never smoked. The major factor in starting is peer pressure and I didn’t have any peers around me at the critical time who did. My family didn’t either.
I seldom drink alcohol and then I have only ever enjoyed cider - not beer, wine or spirits. This is just a matter of the taste for me. I simply don’t like it.
As a kid, I had had grape juice and I had heard adults enthusing about wine as usual and I had a idea what it must taste like.
If you imagine a taste/mouthfeel spectrum with wine at one end and grape juice in the middle, what I imagined wine to taste like was pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum to what it actually tastes like. I had one mouthful and had no desire for any more at all. I have obviously tried wine and the rest at various times since, but my opinion is basically the same.
With cider, I’ll seldom have more that a pint or two a month these days.
I was halfway through this and increasingly puzzled before I realised that you are NOT talking about the 1945 Hitchcock film.
I always heard it as trombeleese, which I imagined to be some exotic musical instrument like this:
My comment was a (half) joking one on the increase in capacity over time due to technology advance - and the bloat in software. As I recall, the early USB sticks that I had were something like 32mb - useless by todays standards. Meanwhile the increasing size of even blank .docx pages has been remarked on over the years.
In my experience, they last until you look at the capacity a few years and several changes of use down the line and end up giving to someone for some weird reason with a single MS document filling it up.
I was around 20 years too late.
They didn’t attend mine either, as it happens, on the grounds that they too were “late” by then.
Remember them: yes.
Feel anything: it is usually a particular event or something that causes me to bring them to mind, so any feelings will be more tied to the event that caused the memory than the place itself - and that could be good, bad or just unusual. I don’t think that I have ever had reason to look at street views of any of them.
Sentimental: not in general. They all had good points and not so good. I enjoyed living in them most of the time, but I enjoy where I am now too.
The closest to sentimental would be when I spent a night at one of the old places some years later. I used to live on site for work, but my role changed. No-one lives there now. It is used for meetings and storage etc, but someone will occasionally sleep-over for one reason or another, as I did on this occasion. That evening I felt like a ghost haunting my own past.